According to the New Internationalist, the Kenyan police are flipping out and killing anybody who gets in their way, scaring the shit out of everyone:

Isaac Okero, Chairman of the Law Society of Kenya (LSK) said most of the lawyers pursuing criminal cases in court, such as Kimani was, are at risk. They receive death threats, intimidation or are forced to take bribes and drop such cases. Refusal to co-operate has landed many lawyers into trouble.

‘In this country, we have seen witnesses disappear and suspects go missing. For instance, International Criminal Court (ICC) witnesses were intimidated and forced to withdraw, a few recanted their evidence yet others disappeared and were later found dead,’ Okero said.

Okero pointed out that suspects arrested by police, such as those from the Al Shabaab militia group, have never been taken to court for trial. Nobody knows where they normally end up. ‘It could be anyone’s guess’, said Okero. The LSK chairman claimed that the three police suspected of murdering the lawyer, his client and taxi driver, may be set free in the next few weeks. This would not be exceptional. He emphasized that it would not be enough to fire the police officers alone.

‘Extra judicial killing among Kenyan police is being normalized and this is taking our country back to dark days. As lawyers, we condemn this practice. To show our solidarity for our fallen colleague, we down our tools for one week in protest,’ Okero declared.

In other words, Kenya has a strong and decisive police force. It’s like America’s in the great old days when we could rely on our cops to be wizards.

Notice that there’s institutional conflict between the police and, in this case, the defense attorneys. In Nazi Germany, the persecution of Jehovah’s Witnesses involved conflict between the police and the judges. From the cop point of view, judges were being too lenient and letting a foreign-controlled anti-state organization get away with its subversive activities. The cops went ahead and took the necessary measures to defend the Homeland. From Detlef Garbe’s Between Resistance and Martyrdom: Jehovah’s Witnesses in the Third Reich:

In 1934 a considerable number of Bible Student cases resulted in acquittals because the courts declared the IBSA bans, which had been issued in the various states, to be legally invalid. These judicial decisions greatly restricted the Gestapo’s possibilities of persecuting Jehovah’s Witnesses. The Gestapo quickly decided to use their own methods in punishing the defiance of Jehovah’s Witnesses against the ban. For this purpose, they used the “protective detention” clause, which had been made available for the executive body of the police authorities by means of the February 28, 1933, Decree of the Reich President for the Protection of People and State. This decree enabled the police authorities to impose protective detention for an unlimited period of time, at their own discretion, in all cases in which they considered “public law and order to be endangered.” In practical terms, such protective detention orders amounted to orders for imprisonment at one of the concentration camps, which had been in use since March 1933. However, in contrast to a judicial arrest warrant, a warrant for protective detention from the police authorities could not be appealed.

Because Jehovah’s Witnesses tended to go straight back to their “prohibited activities,” and because the cops felt that judges were too lenient, they started re-arresting people in court right after the judges had ordered them released for time served. The judges felt their authority was being undermined. It was their bureaucratic right to decide sentences, and they wrote indignant memos about it.

Notice that this is similar to the complaints of American judges who’ve spoken against mandatory minimum sentencing, saying that it infringes on their judicial discretion.

Under the Nazis, the courts simply lost the bureaucracy fight and ceded ground to the cops:

[T]he legal authorities themselves eventually carried out the instructions coming from the highest police authorities at the Prinz-Albreicht Strasse in Berlin–to some extent under compulsion or because of overzealous compliance–but based on their own initiative. In other words: the manner in which these especially obvious conflicts and questions of competence regarding court proceedings against Jehovah’s Witnesses were handled and resolved gave evidence of the fact that, ultimately, the legal authorities surrendered almost completely to the Reichsfurhrer SS.

Under Obama, the FBI failed to pursue charges against Hillary Clinton, obviously because they’re under Obama. What happens when Trump controls border enforcement and the Justice Department?

One thing that’s unlikely to change is the rhetoric police use to justify themselves. Here’s what the Kenyan police have to say about terrorizing the population:

In defending the police officers’ misconduct and rampant killings, Charles Owino, police spokesperson said that in any big family, there must always be at least one person with bad behavior. He admitted that the three who were murdered were killed by police officers who have since been placed in custody pending investigations and possibly charges.

Owino stated that there are more than 100,000 police officers, both regular and administrative, countrywide. He affirmed that all the officers are trained and know that, as police officers, their sole mandate is to protect citizens.

‘We have a constitutional mandate to protect all citizens regardless of their background. Again, we are a large family of police officers so blanket condemnation is unfair,’ he repeated.

Owino blamed citizens for casting a negative attitude on Kenya’s police, arguing that there are no other police from outside who will come to protect Kenyans apart from their own officers. He denied the term extrajudicial killing, explaining that it is a misplaced word used by media to paint police as murderers.

‘We don’t have death-squads in the police unit. Neither do we have extrajudicial killers. These words are a media creation to form a notion among citizens that police are their enemies,’ Owino, the police spokesperson, refuted.

However, in the coastal region, several families blame police for missing loved ones, relatives and friends. The Human Rights Commission has identified 86 cases of people missing while in custody in the coastal region.

Between January and April this year, 53 people have been shot dead by police across Kenya. Last year, there were 126 cases of those missing and murdered. In 2014 there were 199 cases.

For comparison, the US has about 7 times the population of Kenya, so an equivalent rate of police killings would be 1400/year. There were 1186 killed in 2015. If America descends deeper into a fascist nightmare, police will just keep repeating the same talking points and enough people will want to believe them.